Alex didn't move for a long time.The old man didn't either. He just stood there at the edge of his own path, hands still shoved in his pockets, waiting for whatever came next the way you wait for weather.Nothing came next. Not right away.Alex looked at the black shell where his place used to stand, and the thought that finally rose up through everything else wasn't grief.It was guilt.This was all about him.Monica was innocent. Yolanda was innocent. A dog and a bird that had never once wandered beyond this road had no stake in this fight. He knew it with sickening certainty: if he hadn't come here, they would still be alive.They were just people who happened to live in the house he came to.Caught in a crossfire that had started before they'd ever met him.And Alex already knew, standing there, exactly whose crossfire it was.Ragnar's grandfather.He didn't have proof. Not yet.This had the shape of that order all over it.He just couldn't prove it...."Tell me everything again

The day Regent's four products went on sale, three men in three different rooms heard the news and laughed.At Red Tower, Garrick Vail read the price list out to his elders the way you read out a joke you've already heard."Twenty dollars," he said. "A brick. That's their answer to five hundred years.""They're saying it replaces a flame-charm entirely.""They can say what they like." Vail dropped the sheet on the table. "You know what a Red flame-charm actually is? It's the man who comes to your door on the first of the month. Same man who came to your father's door. Three generations of a family have taken their tea with our people while the charm gets renewed." He smiled. "You don't replace that with a brick."At Black Tower, Dorren Ashe barely looked up."Let them sell rods to farmers," he said. "Nobody's afraid of a farmer."And in a glass office sixty miles away, Silas Kessler was told that Regent had launched a flying car at four thousand dollars. He said the one sentence that

A tower cannot simply declare war in the United State of Magic.It can say the words. Ashe said them, and by noon the next day they were in every hall in the city. But saying them starts a clock, not a war, because the government has to ask why first — and the government has done it the same way for four hundred years.They hold a banquet.Seven tower masters. Ten elders each. And every tower brings its brightest young ones, because the whole point of the tradition is that the next generation watches their elders try to solve something without killing anyone.The invitation reached the White Tower at four in the afternoon.Elias read it twice and looked up."They want the master of the White Tower.""Then they'll get him," Alex said....The hall was older than any of the towers in it.Long table down the middle, dark wood, and above it a screen of pale glass the size of a barn door — the recording glass, which had hung there since before anyone's grandfather. Everything said in that

White magic was never fragile. Once, it stood undisputed at the pinnacle of the Seven Towers. Its downfall wasn't a flaw in the art, but in the practitioners, who abandoned true cultivation for cheap, instant strength.In the long game, white magic outshone all others; it just demanded years of refinement, and the world had grown too impatient to wait.White took the students nobody else wanted and taught them to be useful in quiet ways, and every other tower had smiled at it for so long that they'd forgotten what the colour actually was.White is the source light.Not a spell. Not an element. The thing every other kind of magic is a shadow of — and there is exactly one thing in this world that a shadow cannot survive.Black Tower had spent five hundred years building an empire out of the dark.They had just walked four thousand of it into the light....Merrick's second went for a curse and nothing came out of his hands.Nothing. Not a weak one. Not a flicker. He said the words twice

The old man never saw the sword’s attack.He was still looking up with his arms spread when something moved through the space above him, and then the forty tons of stone he was holding in the air came down all at once, because there was nobody holding it anymore.His head was on the flagstones before the slabs finished falling.The other four did not move for a full second.That second was all they had. They'd been standing behind him for twenty minutes doing nothing, because they hadn't needed to do anything — he was the one who could attack the machines, and the four of them had spent the whole fight watching him work and feeling safe.The drones came in off the wall.The nearest man got two words of a hex out before the needle took him in the jaw. The second turned and ran and made it eleven steps. The third and fourth went down back to back in the middle of the yard with their hands still up, and the whole thing was finished so fast that the dust from the falling stone hadn't sett